


Bound

by fugues_of_our_own



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (as told by the baroque devil on Will's shoulder!), Blood, Bluebeard's last?, Eternal Return, Fallen Angel Hannibal, Faustian Intimacy, Fireside Adversaries, First Kiss, Imagined and Remembered Touch, Implicit Antler Sex, M/M, Murder Husband Hallucination, Post-Season/Series 03, Predator Hannibal, Reunion, Righteously Violent Will, Ruin and Flood, Sexual Tension, Sharing Wine, Will Chooses, Will's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-04 16:58:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5341595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fugues_of_our_own/pseuds/fugues_of_our_own
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is seven months after The Wrath of the Lamb. Will has been wandering alone through Europe, assimilating his new insights and disentangling his intentions. Hannibal has given Will a key and an address where, when he is ready, he can find him. Their relationship has withstood separation, but neither know whether it can survive consummation.</p><p>(A fairytale mood piece, rather than plot. Everything turned up to 11. Might exceed your recommended daily intake of alliteration, allusion, and metaphor.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eternal return

* * *

The sun has left the street. I press my palm to the cooling stone wall, thinking now of hands, of those who had laid theirs here before me. Hands to lift and chisel and smooth, hands to caress and inspect and wet. Hands to make the first cut, and hands to make the last. Pietra forte, long suffering under the dark of its own weight, one day fractured along its flaws, and split open to the sky. Underneath the borrowed fret of the town’s combustion and conversation, it is still exhaling the deep heat of the quarry.

I look up as the last limb of light vaults the top of the wall. No candles in windows to guide my way. No beacons of encouragement. Balconies empty and shutters closed; no shine of glass to suggest presence. I have the key, though. The heavy key, almost hot from my grip. Would the house itself feel the shock of its warmth? Would the stones shiver, the façade ripple with recognition? I imagine the metal melting into the lock, it taking all my strength to turn over.

The heavy key, placed without question in my palm. Cold enough, at first touch, to scald. Did you know I would use it? Or did you imagine it would have rusted and crumbled, before I would come to you?

The months since have licked the salt from my body. When I swallow, I no longer taste the alloy of adrenaline and iron which flooded my head for days. The sting of brine in my eyes is gone. I am fresh, new, expunged. Free to live with the weightlessness of my choice.

I lift my fingers off the stone, stepping back from the wall. The doorway is dark with shadows which sway, slowly, in time with the swell of my blood. The carved lengths of the doors are pierced with rivets, binding the oak to itself. I close my eyes, and breathe the dusk. I hear the stutter and whine of motorcycles, the clop and patter of pedestrians, and the slice of a siren. Could this place exist without you? Would this world exist without you?

I feel a coolness at my neck, a drift of air like the retreat of silk. The evening disturbed by your presence, standing at the edge of my sight. I open my eyes, but do not look. The shadows are the same. At this distance, you do not cast your own across me. But yet, I feel your warmth and weight, as if the cobblestones conducted the flow of you straight to my spine. I feel your inhalation as you take me into you. Part of me gone, forever. Catalysed in the alchemy of your blood, and burnt up in the synapses of your thoughts. I hear you breathing now, though I never heard your footsteps.

I breathe once, myself, then turn to meet the tides of your eyes. They shine with the onyx light of the sea at night, and threaten to pull me under. I hold still, knowing that if I can survive this first look, I will live to survive others.

Your one step towards me courses through my body. All the known wounds strain and pulse, ready to split apart. Another step, and the ache pushes through every interstice, finding again the hairline fractures which desire had once discovered. A third, final, step, and my vision darkens with the nearness of you. You bring the distant scent of oudh, smoke, and salt, again. You leave one step, one reach, between us. It is too dense to cross. We remain still.

The first thing you say, after our months of silent communion, I feel inside my head, as if you had put your words to my skull. The first thing you say is, _could I bear it, I would hold my hand to your neck, and feel my body fill, as if it was you I was made of._

I cannot manage a response. But I feel the hand you have not yet raised, wrapped around my throat. The ghost of a touch; future or past, I do not know. I breathe again, accepting now that we share the same air, and that, together, we are real. Would I ever have been, without you?

Your eyes leave mine, and move down to my hand. You see the infra white of the key, glowing through my grip. _There is so much you can make yours,_ you say, _if you will follow into yourself._ Guiding me with your gaze, you look towards the lock. I close my eyes after I step forward, as if sight is distraction. I place my left hand on the door, and lean into the split and riven wood. My right rises to the iron plate, and my thumb traces the cut of the keyway. Here, I could stay forever. Here, neither inside nor out, and your insistent shadow at my back. But we are no longer suspended. We are falling. And I must learn to live, soon, before I am split apart on the rocks.

Inside the building is cool. An echo of shadows around a staircase, leading up to another door. We walk up the marble, your footsteps following mine. I reach the door, and know to stop. There is something in your hand. Through the dark I see it is a shard of metal, and memory slices cold across my gut. You pause, feeling my retreat. Your head dips slightly, bringing black into the well of your cheekbones, and stillness speaks the words which your lips do not form. Waiting, for me to see. It is the next key you are holding, and with a murmur of fabric and slide of metal, you open the door to us.


	2. The better to savour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will has returned: unannounced, but not unexpected. Hannibal gets them some wine, the better to savour seeing him again.

* * *

Kitchen lights low. Contours we have come to know of each other, discernible again in the shades. Colours I have come to recognise, spilling again through my mind. You have on a three-piece, fine woollen suit, with porcelain-white shirt and suitable tie. I see how the light strikes platinum in your hair, and caresses your forehead, cheekbones, and the shine of your lips as you say, _excuse me, briefly, while I change_.

I lean my hands on the granite counter in the centre of the room. A bottle of wine, glistening with the dew of its chill, is attended by two wine glasses, tall as towers, clear as lenses. As you walk away, the abstract angles and shadows of you move amongst their prismatic delicacy. I wonder whether to reach forward, put my fingertip to the mirage, and cause the exquisite reflections to fracture and fall. Whether my touch would be enough to turn you to a fine, white dust. I blink, and the question recedes.

From the window, I glance back at myself, seeking solace in the city floating behind me. I look through to the flickering periphery, and then further out. The sun has settled quietly into the hills. A teal glow remains where the day still resists the black beyond; but that is fading. We are surrounded by cabals of historic buildings, with buttery stone kept rich under loving lights. And every line of sight is crowded with statues, silhouettes, portrayal: all the intricacies and exaggerations of a people.

Your returning reflection swims through the shadows of the window. You are now wearing a midnight-blue V-necked sweater, simple. As natural on you as it is unfamiliar. Nothing underneath, it stretches and tightens around your powerful torso in a way which I quite expect, and yet, for which am still somehow unprepared.

Your eyes join with me in the glass. It is not clear which version of us is watching the other. The light falls down the tendons of your neck, and settles on the slope of your collarbone. It illuminates the lines of your musculature, flexing slightly as you breathe. It tells me too much of what I already know. All the rest of you is ink.

 _Who do you see?_ you ask.

I look down and away.

There are grapes on the counter; misted, plump, dark. I choose one and thumb away the glaucous bloom. The newly-exposed peel glistens under the trail of my skin. I hold it between my fingers, pressing its purpureus swell until it is ready to break and burst; then, swiftly, pull it from its pedicel. I can imagine your teeth, finding the weakest spot. There will be a final shine of pressure over the skin, then a crack as it ruptures under the sharp of your incisor. The sweet slick will break into your mouth, and rivulets of juice flow down your throat, before you even swallow.

 _We never had our wine_ , I say.

Your head tips in acknowledgement. Like a blur to me, hands move smoothly over the bottle, spin the blade-edge round the golden foil, and uncover shining dark green. You work the screw deep into the cork, wrest it with a specific concentration of force, and lift its fragrant stain to your nose, as is your custom.

Do I know what you are feeling now, holding that bottle, the cool drops running through the valleys of your fingers? Your hand tilts and the amber liquid swells through the ball of the glass. Your face says nothing as you offer it to me. The stem is long enough for our fingers not to touch. You pour your own glassful and sweep it under your nose, pausing to apprehend something I do not. Do I know what you are asking, when you hold your glass up to me, watch as I return the gesture, and without ever taking your eyes from mine, finally drink? Do I know what you are tasting? Is it the first sip of me, crushed with a thousand fruit?

The wine slips across my own tongue. The flowers unfurl, liquor melting along the membranes of my mouth. Once I have swallowed, I pull the rim back from my lips, inhaling the different distillations of the retreating perfumes.

You gaze is now focused on my glass, on the haze where my lips have been. The first mark my mouth has made. Before the gloss of the initial mouthful has merged back with the rest of the wine, I return the glass to my lips. Your eyes flicker. I drink down one, two, and-three draughts of the liquid, finishing it. You watch, then run your tongue tip through your lips, pushing them together to fix the impress. You close your eyes, and exhale. I put down the glass, but keep my fingers fixed over its base. My arm forms an arch between myself and the counter; a buttress amidst the currents of my body.

The wine is sliding through my mind as my origami words unfold. _Will we become death?_ I wonder. _Determiner of worlds?_

 _No_ , you reply, eyes opening. _We determine nothing; only create._

You came to me a false prophet, cloaked in deceit; but inwardly you wore the stripped skin of truth. By his fruit did I know him, ripening inside me.

 _And are you,_ I continue, _my artist?_

Your voice cracks as your answer unscrolls. _Only as much, and as irrevocably, as you are mine._

I lifted up mine eyes, and saw the future upon which I was dashed. I could not stop up my ears against the song of your blood. I could not close my eyes on the light of your mind. You got in through the rock of my skull. There is no defence when two things are made of the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personally, I was very upset that Hannibal never got to have a sip of his and Will's delicious-looking "date" wine, before they fought the dragon. What a waste. This one's for him.


	3. Fireside adversaries

* * *

We sit opposite each other. The wings of the armchairs rise either side of our heads; fine battlements from which to survey. For now, we have attained a perilous balance. I do not know if this is the last night, or the first. We have no story to which to defer.

The drawing room fire burns steadily through the supply of juniper wood.  The resin, cohered by decades out on bare mountain passes, now sweetens and melts into this air, consecrating the foundations of our memories. We can close our minds around each other, and walk those rocky sites as if the mountains themselves were cathedral columns, staggering up in prayer; knowing that soon the last sun will sink and leave us there, entirely to ourselves.

Our wine is warmer now, but we drink it slowly, allowing the flavours to ripen. Your neck aglow by firelight. Shadows falling deep in down your chest. You make no attempt to avert your body from the inference of my eyes. One side of your face, reflecting radiance, guards me with a sparkling cinnabar eye. The other side, hidden in night, sees all.

_When you talk,_ I confess, _I feel your voice in my throat._

Your fingers lift slightly off your leg; meet the central crease of fine dark wool, then return to rest on your thigh. Your voice is deepened by something I do not yet know the weight of. _You used to say I was in your head_.

_Where else would you be?_ I murmur; indictment and invitation. And your silence becomes hard to look at, but I keep hold.

Then, the distance comes down, and there’s almost a smile as the comment deflects. _Any elsewhere is discoverable,_ you counter; emptying my question of meaning.

I shake my head. No. I get up from my chair, and walk away. Not this. I will get what I came here for. Even if I don’t, yet, know what that is. I will not suffer anything other than truth.

I stop, and look towards, rather than through, the floor-length window on the other side of the room. Perhaps if I kept walking, into the faint painting of me shining in its depths, there would be only a slight shiver and then I would find myself back five years: uninspired, unassailed, walking towards a dark-polished door; wavering, detached, and deciding not to enter. Turning back to a world which never became. Merely a figment in one of your imaginative equations. Black on a page.

Your voice comes quietly across the space. _Is it still omission, then, our sin?_

I break my face into what looks like a smile, but is not. _Only when we know what would take its place._

I turn back round, to face your chair. Your eyes lift to mine and hold the weight of my gaze. I follow the glide of your cheekbones and how your lips, pushed together, move subtly as you swallow. Your close-shaven skin looks supple after the attentions of the razor and now I also remember, painfully, the softness of your neck. My own skin rises for you as I sense the rough beat of blood under your clothes.

_And if I left the fire,_ you envision, _and walked the bridge between us…_

But it is I who have been walking.

Just before I reach you, you stand up, and your step towards me takes us to within inches. We stop, mirrored. Your eyes are narrowed slightly, a frown shimmering your brow; as if you have suffered a defeat. The fire falls around us.

_If,_ I suggest, _I am yours: then I could make art of your body._

I see the ripple of tension across your cheek. _But perhaps I can no longer draw you,_ you admit, _the way you consider drawing me._

I feel your hand already, in the imagined and remembered place, as I utter my request. _Could you bear it?_

My voice is broken between grief and peace. Two voices, in counterpoint. And others in between and elsewhere: I trail them. The frayed strings of me will make fine melody in your gifted hands; fraught and flexed and cleansed as I have been; pegged to perfection. I was already tuned to the primal key of bone and wind and cartilage, but along came my artisan and he found me new frequencies by carving out of my body all that was not his.

For now, you are steady and quiet, and I am unanswered. But I know your stillness well. It is always the prelude to the composition you intend. I’ve felt the strike and close of those tender muscles around me, and I recognise your poise on the edge of an inevitability.

You swallow. _Yes,_ you confirm, voice thick.

And you raise your left hand to the right of my neck – not touching – but palm ready to press its pulse to my throat, thumb ready to cut across my cheek. My body flinches at the thought of a deeper contact – the agony of former intimacies. But fear is not the thing; rather a sense that our rites of reconnection are absolving me of my own restraint.

Then comes your touch, gentle and whole. I lift my eyes to yours and my mouth opens in instant recognition. It is the warmth soaring through me, as you return me to my lawful place: martyr to your imagination. Simultaneously, it is the acute emptiness, as you exorcise the invaluable pretence of who I was. But I keep our eyes together, as you hold my face carefully away from yours. I will not buckle under this beauty. I will survive it.

_Because you have found me,_ you say, _be warned. I will never relent my love for you._

I see sets of ancient eyes, watching us from domed heights. Meticulous in the art of destruction. Was it their fingers which first stirred our endless agitation? Were they proud of their design, the day they turned our sights to each other, and saw what became of our fates?


	4. An awful slow certainty

* * *

In front of the fire your fingertips are through my hair and your thumb lies at my jawline. My throat brushes the heel of your hand as I try to swallow. Every second is another detail. A longing dense yet weightless. Exposed to your eyes, I have only your hold to stop me slipping through the dark mirror of your thoughts.

I wonder if your touch will lessen, but when it doesn’t, I realise that you cannot now let me go. Subtly, your hand presses deeper.

_Look at me,_ you counsel.

I blink the firelight into stained-glass shards and blink again to resolve your face. Your eyes fasten me to you: my most grave inquisitor. _Is it,_ you ask, _still in your interest to save yourself?_

My right hand drifts up to your own outstretched arm, and my fingers alight on the inner skin of your wrist. I keep the touch to a careful minimum; a perching bird only spared the shock of electric because it hasn’t yet earthed the wire.

Concentrating, I run one finger along the seam of your skin, finding the delicate tension of the palmaris tendon. I continue over its crossing of fine defenceless veins before the tremor comes straight from your body and into my own. Your jaw tightens, your gaze goes down my legs.

_Look at me,_ I say.

Slowly, you raise your head. Then also your chin, until you are at full height, imperious. Now to look, I must tilt back my head into the clasp of your fingers. And you watch me whilst your thumb runs the length of my right cheek. A touch slow and focused enough to cauterise any wound. Your breathing is heavy, but the strength of your chest for the moment contains you. I know you are seeing the red and the black of our previous nights. An unconscious sweep of your tongue leaves your lower lip gleaming in the firelight. If I were to lean forward, before it dried, and join mine own to yours, whose lips would come away blistered?

I reach my left hand up to a lock of fallen hair over your eyebrow; caress it away. Your skin is soft to my presence, nerves wrung with every detail, and you flinch as my fingertips touch your temple. Watching your mouth gather with concentration, I suddenly covet your lower lip – wondering what would happen if I took the same fingertips along it. What would become of me then, if I crossed into the hot velvet of your inner lip, and forward came your tongue over your teeth to wrap my finger round?

Wary, I touch the back of my hand to your cheek instead, fitting the curved contraction of my fingers into the sculpt of your skull. After, I trace up along your jaw, and the first bite of stubble catches my skin. And your wise eyes never leave me, though here your wisdom has no use.

Suddenly, your right hand twists into the shirt above my hip. The press of your knuckles into my side strikes fractures of intolerable pleasure through me. Then comes your voice, so resonant, that I think it might already be inside me, bowing the threads of my throat. _Every conquest,_ you remind me, _is both victory and ruin._

In a search for stability, I grasp your shoulder. I lean on you for two breaths; then, recovering, take my own hand back up your neck and wrap it round the nape, the way you have held me all this time. Our paralleled arms are taught with intent; holding each other apart as much as together.

I whisper your name. It is both a supplication, and a warning. You will not become me; nor I you – but to continue risks following so far into the other that the stars would never again be seen.

Yet I feel the flex of our arms drawing us nearer. An awful, slow certainty of love. Your grip at my waist is unfolding, letting go the clutch of fabric and now moulding itself over muscle instead. The heat from your palm is everywhere in me, and I know you feel the rough pulse of iliac artery pounding the blood through our hips.

Fingers pressing, hands pulling. Lips drifting towards. My breathing is ragged and fragmented by a faint cry.

Your grip tightens and the space lessens until the coming storm of you is all I see. So I close my eyes and wish for the water, for the roll of the ocean, to fold me into you and dissolve us. The roaring wave, I hear it clearly now: an enormity of sound, offered up by the cavern depths, borne forward by a relentless horizon. Just before our mouths touch your breath flickers through me. The last fragments of space between us still hold eternities of choice. They whisper through the air we share, flowing in and out. And then they are gone. Our lips meet and skins break and flesh sinks into the other. We feel, at once, the endless death of other worlds. The sound stops as we seal ourselves together. There is no more wave, no roar; only the sudden, clear silence as we submerge. I have chosen. I have chosen. I have chosen.


	5. The deep peace of my violence

* * *

Your lips absorb mine and mine yours until I do not know whose I feel in the exponential spread of sensation between us. Our tender, hot pressure, holding with such careful force, as our surging tidal shadow rears and rends through cities inside. The shift, crack, collapse; bone-marrow wrecks; our symphony of mute destruction. This moment too much for one memory: all throughout, we hold.

Gradually, our lips unpress – but only when they separate, do I finally inhale. The first breath, after you. A new rupture in time. Your own breath skims my top lip, our noses aligned. No more than a centimetre of closeness conceded. A distance already too much for you; your mouth follows mine as if a part of you had severed. _Stay,_ comes your instruction, inaudible.

A rush of cool air as you inhale me; then your exhalation, my elements extracted. You could stand and breathe me here and never know a pleasure more exact than that. But it is both of our fates to entice the extreme. Your will. My talent. And nothing I have known is more extreme than this terrible, guiltless honesty. Nothing more appalling to me than this death of all my concerns.

My lips are glowing with the shock of our contact. Not even the feather of your breath over their skin can convince the somatosensory cortex that they are not still pressed upon yours. That we are not still bound together. You feel my own breath, too, stripping your skin of precious information. Your texture: all the loves I never touched – and yet entirely other. Your warmth: a new wound. Your nearness: unbearable – unless total.

I brush my upper lip, again, on yours, and the delicate pain quivers. Instantly, we fit back into the whole. A second kiss which we breathe together, sharing the moment’s flavours; inhaling, tasting each other tasting; until the pressure passes endurance, and with a soft raw moan we release our air as one.

This sound strikes a fissure in you. Your quick fingers tangle my hair into a wincing knot and your breath comes sharp and loud. I tighten my grip on your wrist, pulse throbbing under my fingertips. My body cracks with desire as you pull me back in. Sparks of memory forge and splinter at once, repeatedly: the warm silk of us open to each other; blaze of mouths, full-lipped and adamant, strength of the high-moon tide; tongues angled, pressing, hooking; smooth, hot, a lover’s knot; knives of your teeth tugging me, impossibly, closer; and the same, again; and more, aching and unlimited.

And you are in me and I am in you and the wild flow of this electricity burns through all the filaments of our nerves. And this agony of awareness is everything I’ve longed for and worse. My body convulses with the fury of it; all doors unlocked, all darkness rising, at the imminence of you.

There will be penance for this audacity. The expense of each other is death.

And I push you away and stagger back as far I can, panting empty air, all contact lapsed; eyes closed, desperate, calling all steel in me to stop the explosion of orgasm igniting the base of my spine. I push against every tide of my body, forcing myself to unshatter.

And, then, I do.

But – just as I survive, clinging at the mute edge of my nerves – I look up and see you, your mouth dark and wet and open. You come for me, carving the room with the pace of a predator. _I will exhaust you,_ you say, not stopping to sound human. My awe rises like fire, feeding on the petrol pulse of my blood. Your wrath is almost upon me, and my saliva glistening on your lips is red in the firelight.

But I did not come to make a sacrifice. I summon myself and, before your hand has my throat, lean a stone punch into your sternum. My knuckles crack and echo through your bones. The mass of me colliding with your lethal impulsion is enough to hinge you over at the hips. You drop, silent and breathless. Without pausing to feel the burn in my wrist, I swing my fist back up, in a solid strike to your face, forcing your cheek into your teeth as the blow rings from your jaw up into your skull. Blood blows from your mouth and rises into the air as your face sails away with the force. You almost fall, but catch your balance with your hands on your knees.

I stop, watching you lean on yourself – teeth bared in pain, wet with rage and pride.

Soon, slowly, you uncurl. Straighten, open your neck to the sky, and with a silent gasp, drink down the night. You breathe, loudly, once more; then move your head back down to me, and stare. You utter a word I have never before heard, but do not need translated. It is from a cold place long ago and I understand that it is either the beginning or the end of me.

Yet I continue, reckless and alive, into the labyrinth of your desire. _You will kill me,_ I confirm. My voice has never sounded more familiar. _I want it more than death. But I choose when._

Your hypnotised eyes blink slowly in a nod of consent; you find it proper.

Barely recovered, you come to me. Two quiet strides. Cheek shine-white and crimson, lip split and swollen. Your hands rise to hold my face, more gently than if I was an urn of ancient and precious life itself. There is the full faith of me in your eyes. They glow with the deep peace of my violence. For a moment, I imagine the twisting snap of my spine.

But you lean into my neck - touch your wounded lips to my skin - and kiss your blood onto my throat.


	6. Later the same night

* * *

Sleep is not here, of course. Not with me. I wander, throughout the house. Feet suspended over smooth parquets and sinking carpets. I seek my faded face, tarnished and repeating in the antique silver-glass. My hands want the cool walls to push back at me. There are many windows, sealed with many shutters. Behind them I know I could still see the same world I walked in from, although, surely, it must now be far away. I am drifting, not thinking. Sounding myself against others who aren’t there any more or never were.

The door handle gives way under my touch, smooth and silent. I puzzle that it was closed at all. The meek first light is just enough to see by. It is pale blue, perhaps borrowed from the egg-shell sky, as the light slowly cracks its dome. You sleep, naked. Like one of your own drawings. Sketched diagonally across your bed – an uncommon crucifixion. Your lack of symmetry is surprising. Your upper half is exposed in a sleepy pearl glow, lithe hips pooled in shadow. The rest of you continues under the close contours of a silk sheet. Your breathing limbs ribbon with muscle, ready to arch to life. Your ribs shift like keys under the chords of your breath. I follow the slope of your pectorals, down your abdominals, to your navel, where you were made human. Your face is a play of light and shadow; highlights poignant and depths remote.

You sleep.

I stay still, inside of the door. Breathing. Feeling the constraining protection of my thin layer of clothes. Waiting, to know what it is I’ll do. You have washed the blood from your mouth, but there is a raw bruise rising up your cheek, and a deeper one blooming across your sternum. Cradled in the paws of the night, you draw on the black magic of your body to make you new. I watch, until I find my lungs rise and fall with yours.

Until you see me through the dark of your lids. Then there is a shift, and you are awake. Your voice comes for me. _The day has begun to break,_ you note.

And you already understand, but I formalise the response. _We no longer need to meet in the dark._

You breathe deeply, but your eyes do not open. It is both the words and their speaker you inhale. You pull part of me across the air and down to you, into the warmth of the silk you’ve concealed, into the scent of sleep unbroken until now. Then my smell is not enough. Your eyes open on me, and you lift yourself up onto your side. I am, I realise, so thirsty. You sit up fully, and the sheet drifts down your stomach and past your hips. You let it. Weak, rapt, my gaze flickers away. Skin swells with blood and heat and I feel the breaking of walls as all that was empty is filled and all that was mine becomes yours.

 _And now?_ you coax, swallowing down the sight of yourself stirring through my body.

I try to reply but my mouth is crude. I imagine, suddenly, stretching out of my feeble coverings, revealing a skin so thin that one last violent beat of my heart splits me open.

 _Take off your shirt,_ you direct.

So I do. Stomach drops as I see the instant effect on you. Head light as you rise from the bed and walk, slowly, to meet me. I still have my underwear but you have nothing, except your black eyes – all the cloak you require. You are carrying a glass of water. When you are an arm’s length from me, you hold it out, and I gulp it down, and it helps.

You tilt my chin, softly. Then you give each of your fingers a home between the vertebrae of my cervical spine, and walk me backwards until I reach the wall.

I stare into your chest, unrepentant; then lift to you as I say, _it’s good to see the marks I’ve made._

Your head tips in disagreement. _Your marks go all the way through me, into the worlds I’ve touched._

 _And if,_ I reason, laying my hand to your shoulder, _everything I’ve touched is changed by you – will we exist in the same world?_

Your grip tightens on my nape. You raise your other hand and rub your thumb along my jaw. Your words are just soft shapes of air. _Is courage more admirable, for being misplaced?_

My hot hands smooth over and under your biceps, transfixed by this blunt power. It is still strange, that here is your body, and that there is only one. That it apparently contains you, and ends you, and means you. I know that if it were to expire, under bullet or rope or knife, or endless varieties of lesser ends, people would see a space. But I. I would know the intimacy of your absence. The quiet arms would come back round, and hold me in place.

You call my name, and I am confused. I hear a voice disguised for decades. Younger, and stunningly unsure. It hurts, like an unbroken trust. My gaze finds yours, stricken by what you’ve shared.

 _Will you come with me?_ you ask.

I nod.

And so, eyes empty of anything that isn’t me, your thumb pushes onto my teeth and finds their bite.


	7. Greater love hath no man than this

* * *

I open my teeth and take your thumb into my mouth. Onto my tongue: suck the pad, then lick down to the base. Your eyes glimmer but it is your body which betrays you. I hold you there, hot inside me, as your other hand strokes across my stomach. It convulses me, the kiss of your fingers. They travel up, looking for other undoings, finding scars and following them, savouring the memory of my pain. Histories which cannot be made whole again. Fragments which form mosaic for the streets of a citadel: our rarefied, intricate displays of betrayal.

Your touch is that of a man laying gold-leaf. Patient, crucial, it leaks through my skin until the threads of me shine. My mouth lets go your thumb and I lean in, seeking your lips – but you hold back. You are making sure I am real. And of course. I come to you unbound and too ruthlessly loved to be anything else.

Satisfied, your hands settle my shoulders, and you look straight through to my heart. Is it the black moons of your eyes which command the heave and pull of my blood? Was it your afterglow I woke in, damp to the stars and licked with pale beams? You answer my questions by pressing my hand into your chest. You beat through my fingertips; show me that you, also, are a creature of the tides.

My lips ascend to your eyes, and with careful concentration, I kiss them closed. Long I have followed through their shaded waters. Awash in river, only I see where you were kept mortal. You fall still beneath my blessing. Then you breathe with me. Thus anointed, I smell again your spice and smoke; the ferrous scent of blood just under.

Your muscles contract as you take me in. I spark and flinch for the touches yet untouched, and then our bodies come together. Thoughts break apart and flow. The press is hot, already wet, and although we are still on the outside, there are chasms to cross here. Closeness there’s been before, but this nearness, this nearness – our skins moulding to each other – hotter, getting wetter, too close to tell ourselves apart. You are endless against me. What I would do…how I would see…your taught limbs torn by my tongue…soak in your desire…open your body up with mine, and feast on your breath.

I am not sure what I have said. But I hear your fervent yes, on my temple, and feel your affirmation escape my fingers on your throat. I have been crushing you so hard my arm aches. I yield, and remember where I am. The fullness of the moment returns. You are under every nerve; jolting, throbbing, unseamed against me. Whatever pact we have agreed, you honour it with a graze of your cheek, which I chase and turn into a lethal kiss. Simple, absolute. Sure lips to yours.

And then there is no alternative but that our mouths and wrists and palms fall back together, taking more of the same and some of what is still unknown and neither is enough. Our fierce knot feels like we could breach the bounds of our bodies and make such thing as the same place. Your tongue still clasping mine, your breath still in my lungs, you walk us backwards and take me to our bed.

Your muscles rock firmly under your skin as we move. Your careful force tells me how much is still in reserve. I cannot see anything but you, but when you push me down into the silk I know now the colour our blood would make. You slide onto me with your full weight and our hearts crash together and spill through our ribs. I cannot breathe and do not want to. I want to sink under your teeth and dissolve.

But your arms slide mine up along the sheet and you lift, slightly, to let me feel the ripple of air between us. _Breathe,_ you say, your lips hovered over my right carotid. _Breathe me. The way I breathe you._

I do, into the tender of your clavicle, and my body rises along yours. Your fingers let go of my hand and dig into my collarbone, clasping my chest where you hurt. The other hand you fix below my shoulders. Between your two hands I beat.

_You,_ I moan. _Wasn’t it? Always._

Your mouth takes my throat up in a luscious bite, which then loosens into succulent kisses over the peaks of my chest, down through the valley of my ribs, and along my abdomen. Your tongue is heavy and fatal as quicksilver, settling into the channels of my mind and threading through all future contacts. Before you reach my hips, you run a diagonal stripe from my obliques up to my shoulder, and return our mouths to each other.

Our kiss is clasping, wrapped, mirrored in our need. Sinews bending to learn the new ways. Our bodies filled with liquid thoughts. An abyss of love, no hope. The room still dark enough for secrets, but none here.

_You,_ you whisper into my ear. _Only._

Your thumbs prise away the waistband of my underwear. Their tips run delicate triggers through me as the slick fabric lifts from my hips. You let me ache once into the air, and then move down to take me deep into the night of your mouth. I quiver into an arc, and your arms reach underneath to cradle my hips. My mind bites down as your tongue reaches all the way along and the tip of me breaks through your throat. I want, desperately, to cry out. And I do. Engulfed in molten heat. Exquisite, savage strokes. Everything I’ve ever lost is here, unbearable, flowing from my spine and into your body. My hand finds yours and crushes.

But then you leave me, devastated and blind, on the edge of myself.

_No,_ I choke, furious. I reach viciously for you, my grip finding hot muscle and bone.

The heat of your returning shadow covers me fully. You put the ache of your lips on mine. Roll the words into my mouth, spill them over my tongue. _We. Will be. Undone._

The scars of you twist perilously with this incitement, all need of you scored across my skin. Places where my body already broke for you are sweet with the promise of release. Your velvet fingers move through me, sharp as bone. And under your tongue, my wounds open. Those you drew, and those you sealed; all from you, and all returning. My unique suffering. The sign of you on earth. Your perfect weakness.

The vision you have raised in me intensifies. I am unfurling into this new present. My blood stretches from me in luxurious tributaries, twisting ropes into the air. All that I unspool binds you in bands of glistening red. The liquid coils claim your feet, thighs, shoulders, throat. You exalt in the power of these restraints. The rarest artist with the finest materials could not capture the man I see before me. Your skin has the sheen of something made to split. I cut my tongue up from your hip to your shoulder and out comes the blood which beat just for me. I rend my fingers through the divide and merge into the same silken hot red. You pour out across my wrists and over my body, finding every contour. The rest of me fluxes into the dark and rises up in a sleek surge around us. The spaces between us fill and we sink further through the suspension, until the bed is gone, our bodies are gone, until there is nothing left of us apart.

I open my mouth to the lacerated night.

And lay him down. No greater love.


End file.
